Social Media

HOW TO: Give Your Digital Life a Spring Cleaning

Mollie Vandor is the Associate Product Manager at Cooking.com. Prior to that, she helped launch Ranker.com, where she served as the Product Manager, amongst many other roles. You can reach her @mollierosev, on her blog, or on her latest addiction - Words With Friends, where she plays under the username "Mollierosev."

It’s official: Spring has sprung. Time to start spring cleaning. And there is no better place to start than the place you spend most of your time anyway — the world wide web.

There are plenty of tools you can use to tidy up, whether it’s organizing your email, using the cloud to get your files in order, or making the most of your social media. This spring-cleaning regimen is all about getting you organized, optimized and ready to take on the digital world. Read on to find out how:

Email

The folks over at Google say it best: "Email is great, except when there’s too much of it." Fortunately, there are plenty of easy ways to cut the clutter out of your inbox, and even some ways that your inbox will cut it for you.

Gmail has a feature called "priority inbox" that will organize your email into sections. It also learns which messages you open, delete and reply to, so it can actually start prioritizing your inbox for you. If you want to get really hardcore with the Gmail prioritization features, you can also follow this guide to turning your Gmail into the ultimate ‘GTD’ inbox, modeled on the aptly-named productivity philosophy of "Get Things Done."

Of course, most of us have more than one messy inbox to organize. Which is why you may want to start your spring e-cleaning by consolidating all of your email accounts into one manageable mailbox. By routing all of your accounts to the same place, you can check as many email addresses as you want, all from a single site. There’s a great eHow guide to managing multiple email accounts on Hotmail and Yahoo Mail too, because Gmail users shouldn’t be the only ones who get to have all the email organizing fun this Spring.

Similarly, open-source software Zimbra Desktop will create a custom dashboard where you can also check all of your emails from a single place. Digsby not only allows you to check multiple emails from one place but also allows you to check them from within your instant messenger client, which makes for even more consolidation. And, speaking of consolidation, you might also want to look into NutshellMail — a service that consolidates all of your social networking notifications into a single email, which means you can significantly cut down on those social media notification emails once and for all.

While you’re getting rid of notification emails, it’s also a good time to get rid of any mailing lists that you don’t want to be on anymore, particularly in light of the big Epsilon security breach last week. Unsubscribe is a service that places a single "unsubscribe" button in your inbox, allowing you to easily remove yourself from mailing lists, spam lists, and the like. You can even forward them an email and the company will unsubscribe that way too.

If you really want to be proactive about stopping those mailing list emails, you can create a second email address that you use solely for signing up on sites, purchasing products, etc. Before you get worried that this might seem counter-intuitive to the whole consolidation plan, rest assured that if you already have one Gmail address, then you automatically have a second one already created that you can easily start using from the same mailbox. Similarly, Hotmail recently started offering users "throwaway accounts" they could use for just this purpose.

The Cloud

"The cloud" is a term for using “a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or personal computer”, as Google puts it. While that may not sound like the safest place to put all your stuff, there’s growing evidence that it’s at least as safe as the Post-it covered computer on your desk, if not more so. The cloud can also help you organize your music, documents and schedule.

Amazon’s new music player lets you upload your music to the cloud, then play it from any computer or Android phone. The cloud can also free you from having to buy music altogether. Instead, try streaming music from Grooveshark or Pandora. Both services let you search for and play music on the web or on your phone, although Grooveshark lets you pick and save your own songs like a traditional iTunes library, whereas Pandora picks the songs for you in real time, based on your preferences.

Once you’ve got your Pandora station all set up, use it as background music while you move all those disorganized documents from your desk to the — you guessed it — cloud. There's a variety of services that let you backup to the cloud, including Amazon’s own "cloud drive." Similarly, Dropbox lets you upload files directly from your desktop to your very own password-protected piece of the cloud, as well as sync files between your computer and the cloud and access all of it from the web or your mobile phone.

Docstoc also lets you upload files to the web, and allows you to easily share them with others, similar to how Google Docs works. There are also specific tools for storing receipts and creating easy expense reports, plus plenty of dedicated sites where you can store copies of your favorite photos too, including Flickr, Picasa and, of course,Facebook.

The cloud isn’t just great for storing tangible things, it can also store your schedule and help you stick to it. If you use Google Calendar, you’ll be able to view and edit your calendar on your computer or mobile device and set email or text reminders. Mobile Me also lets you use the cloud to keep calendars and reminders in sync across devices, sans Post-its. And, if you just want the reminders without any of that pesky calendar stuff, Remember The Milk lets you set up tasks and to-dos on the web and on your phone.

Social Networks

The average American spends a lot of time on social networking sites. So, it stands to reason that your social networking presence deserves just as much of a spring cleaning as everything else in your life.

Get started by using a service such as Evernote, Springpad, Instapaper or Catch.com to store articles, clippings, blog post ideas, messages and more of the fun stuff you find during your daily web surfing. Most of those services also let you access your stored files on the go from your mobile device, so you can start actually making a dent in that pile of posts you’ve been meaning to read. Similarly, you can sync your browser using Google Chrome’s Browser Sync service or a Firefox add-on such as Foxmarks, which will help you keep links, bookmarks and other browsing behavior organized between different computers.

Of course, one of the biggest organizational challenges when trying to clean up your social networking is the sheer amount of noise involved in managing multiple accounts with large numbers of friends and followers. The first way to cut down on that noise is to make Twitter and Facebook lists of the keywords and connections you want to keep a close eye on. If you’re trying to keep track of multiple online profiles, try setting up an about.me page to showcase all your different accounts in a single place, and cut the clutter of trying to share ten different accounts with all your new contacts. While you’re at it, set up a Google alert to track all the noise that features your profile, then set up a special folder in your email where incoming Google alerts can stay sequestered until you’re ready to deal with them in bulk.

Another easy way to get your social networking profiles organized is to start using a tool such as HootSuite or TweetDeck to monitor and update multiple profiles from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more all in one place. Before you set up one of those tools, take a tough look at which social media profiles are really giving you the best bang for your buck, and get rid of the rest. By targeting your social media accounts, you can cut a lot of the clutter out of your daily routine right away, and focus more of your efforts where they really matter.

To figure out which accounts are worth keeping, try triangulating data from some of the many social media analytics tools out there — Klout, Crowdbooster, ViralHeat and Hootsuite Analytics are all great tools that, when put together, can give you a really detailed picture of the reach and response rate of your various accounts and their related trending topics.

While you’re on a spring social media cleaning spree, now is a great time to make sure your Facebook privacy settings are exactly what you want them to be, and that the profile pic, bio, and links on all your social media accounts are up to date. It’s also a good time to Google yourself and delete any old sites, links, pages, and such that you no longer wish to be associated with. Google even has a handy guide to help you do this.

Conclusion

Studies have shown that organized people live longer. With its warm weather, blooming greenery and promise of summer to come, Spring is the perfect time of year to get organized both at home and on the world wide web. Now, stop reading and get cleaning!

Interested in more Social Media resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.

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